Would you consider this cheating?

My boyfriend and I have been together since 2014, when we were 15. We are 22 now. In late 2018/early 2019 I noticed that he was texting a certain person a lot. Even when we were talking he would be texting her. So I looked over his shoulder and saw the name of who he was texting and I searched them on Facebook. It was a girl who lived in a whole other state. He was commenting on a lot of the memes she posted and she was doing the same on his page. And I noticed that he heart reacted her profile picture (it was just a selfie) and liked a bunch of her other pictures. At this point I was a little suspicious but it was clearly just Facebook talking so I didn’t think anything of it. But then we were in bed and he mentioned that a “weird girl has been texting him a lot” and asking him for relationship advice. The way he was calling her weird and stuff her liking all her posts made me very suspicious. I pretended like I didn’t know who she was and asked her name. He told me and then I dropped him back off at his house. When I got home 10 minutes later, I got back on her profile and saw that he un-heart reacted her profile picture so I wouldn’t see it.

I decided to look at the Facebook conversation on his phone when he went to the bathroom one day. They had so many texts and paragraphs upon paragraphs of long messages, usually talking about their struggles with depression and anxiety. At one point she sent him an old photo of him that she found on his Facebook (it was actually a picture I took of him) and she said “to be honest you’re really cute” and he responded back that he thinks she’s cute too. This made me very angry and I told him I felt it crossed a boundary into emotional cheating.

We had an argument about it and I told him to delete and block her. I said she disrespected our relationship because she knew about me and that friends don’t comment on each other’s appearances. He told me he blocked her but then I found out that she was in his secret messages inbox and he was hiding it from me. This time their conversation was him venting to her about me after we had an argument, which I also felt was crossing into cheating territory.

I ended up confronting him a second time and he ended up blocking her for real. We never really discussed it after that because anytime I would think of I started crying. I randomly started remembering this and how he was so reluctant to delete an internet stranger to make me feel better. I brought it up to him in a nice way last night and how I’m okay with him having girl friends, but I feel it crossed a boundary when they were talking about appearances and hiding stuff from me. He got defensive and said he was young back then and that she crossed a boundary, not him. I told him that it’s the person in the relationship’s responsibility to respect boundaries, not anyone else and he said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He claims that he was just trying to be nice to her because he thought she was ugly/weird and didn’t realize at the time that she was flirting. And that the reason why he vented to her about our relationship was because he wanted advice from a woman’s perspective.

He hasn’t done anything like this since. I would like to add that he has autism so maybe he did see this differently. But it felt wrong to me and really hurt my feelings, and his defensiveness and blame shifting to this day really hurts me. He claims that neither of us has cheated and that he is strongly against cheating. He also hasn’t done anything like this since (that I’m aware of).

Would you consider what he did cheating?

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